Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill

Lord Johnson of Lainston Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

My Lords, first, I express my gratitude to the Whips for allowing me to speak in the gap and apologise for not registering in time.

I have a few quick points to make after hearing what I already know, which is how hard-working and truly valuable Lords Ministers are. By the way, I exclude myself from that group. The idea that we should not pay Government Ministers anything is frankly absurd. In fact, this is an anomaly in our history, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Barber. I add that if you go back to the 1790s, William Pitt was paid £5,000 a year to be Prime Minister and another £5,000 to be Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, which equates to nearly £2 million a year in today’s money. Unfortunately, he then had to borrow a further £2 million from George III to cover his debts, putting some of our more recent profligate Prime Ministers into perspective.

The point is that if we want great statesmen running our country, we need to pay them properly. We can almost draw a geometric line from the salaries of our Ministers from the late 18th century to the zero rate today, and plot our general economic and national decline along it. In no other area of the world would we not pay for expert leadership. If I need to see a medical expert—I am going through my usual middle-aged checks at the moment—my GP does not say, “I’m so pleased. We’ve managed to track down a brain specialist who is the cheapest in the country. In fact, he’s completely free”. No, we would want the best, and actually we would want the most expensive.

I was appointed a Government Minister without any experience of the job or any formal training—and no salary. Indeed, often when asked, normally incredulously, how I got appointed a Lords Minister, I used to reply that I competed on price. Indeed, on the departmental website it said in bold letters after my name “unpaid”, and one visiting dignitary asked me about this with a clear tone that he would rather speak to someone who was paid rather than to a volunteer. I was then fired after two weeks and reinstated two weeks after that, with great dignity, by our leader—a victim, I may say, of fire and rehire. I was asked whether I got my redundancy bonus, and I said that I took 100% of it, which for those of your Lordships who were not listening carefully, was £0. My children kept telling me to resign and go and make some money.

The fact is that we are being dishonest with ourselves and our citizens, with this pretence that we are somehow careful with public money. This really is nonsense. We should pay Ministers far more than we already do. By the way, as we have heard from some noble Lords, we should expect far more from them in terms of outcomes. To say otherwise—and I am afraid my own party was guilty of this—is derogating our nation and is against all the laws of society and economics.

I end, if I may, with an additional plea. Again, under the pretence of good management, Ministers have precious few direct expenses, particularly for those who are unpaid. It is actually quite a costly business being a Minister. On my first day as a Minister, I asked whether there was a car to take me to see an ambassador. “No, Minister”, came the reply, “but we do have the number of a local taxi firm”. One high-level investment summit I had to leave by bus, with all the Saudi delegation looking rather surprised as I waved embarrassedly out of the window of the number 14. Global superpower Britain we were not.

In my last few days in office, we knew what the outcome would be so I was preparing for the worst. A slightly meek official came into my office and said, “Minister, I am afraid you owe us £39.50”. “What for?”, I asked. “For the hotel you stayed at when you visited our ambassador in Germany. It was over the threshold for Ministers’ expenses, so you need to pay the difference”. My last act as a Minister was literally to write out a cheque to His Majesty’s Government, effectively for doing my job. At least Ministers will now have a salary to meet their expenses when they represent their country abroad.

I support this Bill, but in my view it does not go far enough. The issue needs to be debated further. Please can we start by being honest with the people of this country that good politics is not free? We want the best leaders in the world, and we should be prepared to pay reasonably for them. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. This Bill is welcome, but it is only one step in the right direction.